>I suspected that might be the case . Anyway, I'm glad everything is OK. I took a 3-4 month contract that lasted 19+ years - maybe you'll get "lucky", too.

12,5 years in my case, and IIRC such a contract is what got Victor HI... IOW he was lucky already, and who knows, he may stay in Chicago area for many years now :).

>>Uhhh no. There will be no more motorbikes for me -- as last time I was on one I ended up in the hospital for quite a while. It's quite strange to wake up and not be able to recall your own name lol. Instead I'm driving a nice safe Lotus Elise that I picked up a couple years ago. It did snow here one day so I took it to the office (about 5 miles) with snow on the road. I think I might have to pick up an additional automobile to drive because driving a Lotus in the snow is kinda tricky -- and if the snow is ever more than 4 inches deep I'd doubt I'd make it.

Driving on snow is a different beast. The vehicle handles differently, and you either learn it or you give up driving on snow. There are other alternatives, covering vast spectrum of options, from ditch to hospital to wheelchair to...

While in Virginia I got scared each time there was snow on the pavement, because the total amount calculated as total horsepower times tons of iron divided by average IQ of the drivers divided by their cumulative experience in driving on snow is a number larger by a few orders of magnitude than what I was used to. Just 2mm of snow and I'm happy that american roads are so wide and the crossroadses so big, so the idiot on the other side can waltz his four-liter truck far away from me. They may have heard that they should go light on the pedals while on snow, but the distance between the ears and the brain is quite big, it takes a lot of time for the content to arrive.